The Kids Are Alright...Right??

Did anyone NOT notice the 3-page spread in the STAR devoted to those middle school and high school students who made the honor roll for the second quarter. Great News! Right?? With that many kids making the honor roll, we can expect huge strides on the WKCE, right? A budding crop of National Merit Scholars, right?

Hold the phone, Tyrone! Sadly, Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains had to be placed on the back burner as we hastily scribbled counts on the pages of the STAR. [Gotta love "Boston Rob" Mariano] According to the latest copy of enrollment numbers released by the district (1-4-10), there were 1395 middle school students. Our quick, albeit pretty accurate tally, indicates that 840 of these middle schoolers--or should we more properly refer to them as middle SCHOLARS!-- made the honor roll. A grade point average (GPA) of 3.3 or better is required to make the honor roll. That's 60.2%! 6 out of every 10 students made the honor roll! 60.2% of all middle schoolers are B+ or A students!

Wait...it gets better. If you count up the names listed in bold type, those that achieved a perfect 4.0, you find that 103 kids--one out of every 13 middle scholars-- got nothing but straight "A"s. WTF!

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
A little stats lesson is in order. In theory, things like grades should follow a "normal" or "Gaussian" distribution. Many refer to it as the bell shaped curve, or simply, the bell curve. Statistically, 68% of all data should fall in the middle, the "hump" of the curve. That would mean that 68% of all kids would be average ("C", 70-79% score out of 100 points on a test) students. Well....no one wants to think of their child as average, but 70-79% is not bad. We just want better. The first two wings ("B" on one side, "D" on the other) account for about 13.5% each of the population. The outermost wings, ("A" on one side, "below D" on the other) each represent about 2.5% of the population . Yes, sadly, that means--statistically speaking-- about 2-3 out of every 100 kids would be expected to be less than "D" students. Grade inflation fixes all that. In a completely Dr. FeelGood approach, the grading curve is shifted forward, very few kids earn a grade of "C" or worse, and students feel good about themselves.

Applying the Gaussian distribution to the middle schools, it would be expected that no more than about 10-12% of kids would make the honor roll. That translates to about 167 kids, instead of 840. Similarly, only about 35 kids, instead of 103, would have been expected to score a 4.0.

High School picture not much better
A quick count of the high school honor roll shows a little movement towards reality...but not enough. We're not certain whether the Alternative Learning Center (SOAR) students are counted in the tally, but let's assume they are. That puts the total at 1831 high schoolers, and a whopping 744 --or 41%--made the honor roll. At the high school level, the honor roll benchmark is set at a GPA of 3.2, perhaps to coincide with the "Dean's List" mark at the college level. A fewer percentage of students receives all straight "A"s: 81 kids, or 4.4% scored a perfect 4.0.

Tip of the Iceberg?
What worries some in the community even more than what we are seeing is what we are NOT seeing. Clearly the grading curve is skewed pretty heavily towards "A". If the honor roll metric is established at a GPA of 3.3 in middle school, how many kids obtained a GPA of 2.7 to 3.3 (B- and B)???? Based on this curve, it sure looks like at least 80% of middle school kids are scoring a "B" average or better. And that just shouldn't sit right.

Are our kids just smarter? Has the curriculum been "dumbed down"? Or have expectations about the degree to which subject matter knowledge is retained lowered?

Post-High School Culture Shock
Newsflash: we're not doing our kids any favors by mollycoddling them with inflated grades. We have anecdotal reports that SPHS kids entering college are faced with the shock of grading reality. Many that were straight "A" students through high school struggle to maintain a low "B" grade (or worse) in college. Similarly, we hear from others that kids hired right out of high school are not meeting expectations of basic knowledge skills.

Several years ago, the school district initiated a "post-graduate" survey. It was designed to capture the degree to which our kids felt that they had been adequately prepared for life beyond high school. Has any report ever been released? Details discussed at a school board meeting?

Last September, the district made a presentation on a new approach to grading called, Grading for Learning. It sounded like a new grading schema would be implemented for middle school this year. Is that what we're seeing?

No News is Bad News
The Sun Prairie school district continues to operate under the "Sunshine and Roses" doctrine. They report only the really nice news....and bury the items that don't smell very nice. We need to know about the good and the bad so that we--the community-- can tell our elected leaders --the school board -- how they need to direct school administration.

Oh...wait...that would mean...um...er...Community Engagement. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

[SP-EYE: SP-EYE gets a bad rap for writing about the not-so-good things. That may be true...but our position is that this district is never going to be all that it can be until we talk about the good and the not-so-good. We can't take corrective action unless we know what needs correcting. Right?]

2nd Quarter High school honor roll from the STAR

2nd Quarter Patrick Marsh Middle School honor roll from the STAR

2nd Quarter Prairie View Middle School honor roll from the STAR